by Günter Grass
No clear-cut verdict was arrived at. Since both the Revolutionary Advisory Council and the associate judges were divided, a majority could at most have been found for postponement of sentencing. Silent and deathly pale, as though he had decided to become an astral body, the Flounder waited.
And then, at the prompting of Associate Judge Ulla Witzlaff, Ms. Schönherr, the presiding judge, suggested a compromise for which my Ilsebill might have voted, since it promised to satisfy both wishes, the wish for harsh punishment and the wish for prolonged expiation. She proposed that in the Flounder’s presence, under his obliquely set eyes, impossible for him to ignore, at a long table—which would make it necessary to remove three rows of seats from the former movie house—at which the associate judges, the Advisory Council, the prosecution, the defense, and a few representatives of the public would be seated, an ostentatious, memorable, ritual, solemn, and grandiose flounder dinner be held. Ms. Helga Paasch undertook, through her connections with the Berlin wholesale trade, to deliver the required number of flounders to the kitchen of Therese Osslieb’s restaurant, where nine or, when Erika Nöttke expressed concern that nine would not be sufficient, eleven good-sized specimens ranging from four-and-a-half to nine pounds each (at wholesale prices the bill came to 285 marks) were promptly sautéed in tarragon butter, deglazed with white wine, covered with stock, simmered, seasoned with dill and capers, and finally, along with the roe and milt, which are well developed in June, placed in preheated serving dishes, covered with aluminum foil, and (along with boiled poatoes and cucumber salad) conveyed to Steglitz by cab.
In the onetime Stella Cinema the table, forming a horseshoe around the Flounder in his tank, had been festively set. Candles had been lit. Lemon slices had been bedded on lettuce leaves. Chilled Riesling stood in readiness. The steaming dishes were brought in. The Womenal seated itself. After a short but, despite the solemn occasion, whimsical speech, Ms. Schönherr served first the court-appointed defense counsel, then the prosecutor. The flounder dinner began.
I had better explain how I came to have the honor of attending, although, so soon before her confinement, I should have stuck it out with my Ilsebill. The representatives of the public were chosen by lot. And when I drew one of the lucky lots, giving me the privilege of being the only man present among fifty-four women, Ilsebill had no objection. “Don’t miss it on my account. I’ll be all right. It’s sure to be a couple of days more. I’ll send you a wire if necessary or get someone to page you in your harem.”
I sat between an old lady, a librarian by profession, and a young schoolteacher who refused to touch the milt though I called it a “delicacy.” She said she abominated male organs but would like some of the female roe. I was glad Ulla Witzlaff was sitting across the table from us, with her head slightly tilted. (She took some of the milt.)
Far away, behind the convicted Flounder’s tank but recognizable, sat Griselde Dubertin and Ruth Simoneit. Hagedorn and Güllen were also provocatively present. I was so excited I made faces. (Let’s hope they don’t start fighting.) So be extra gentlemanly. Bridge gaps in the conversation. Help to carve and serve the flatfish. How easily the white flesh let itself be removed from the backbone. Deftly I served the ladies. “I recommend a few drops of lemon juice. The cheeks, I assure you, are delicious. Would you care for a slice of the tail piece, Ms. Nöttke? Just a little more broth and some capers? How strikingly the dill enhances the taste. And don’t forget to save the boiled white eyes. Flounder eyes bring luck and make all our wishes come true.”
So I made myself useful to the ladies. I refilled wine glasses, filleted deftly, offered “Another potato?,” and even called the girls of the Advisory Council by their first names. I joked with Ilona, smiled at Gabriele, had a kind word for the always gloomy Emma, and was almost of the same opinion as Alice. I livened up the conversation by dissecting a turbot head with anatomical acumen and cracking jokes, but always at the proper moment resumed the gravity required by the solemn occasion. I praised the wise verdict, called the Flounder’s peroration “artfully forthright,” characterized the Womenal as an epoch-making institution, quoted from the well-known ancient Greek feminist play, spoke in passing of my Ilsebill’s impending confinement—“She wants a boy so badly!”—but added at once that I, the father, would be equally overjoyed with a girl, distributed good-luck charms—fisheyes—raised my glass in a toast, and, when nothing remained of the flounders but eleven sets of ravaged heads, fins, skin, and bones, took the liberty, as the very onliest man present, of making a little speech.
Witzlaff laughed encouragingly. Erika Nöttke begged me to make it short. The old lady on my right turned the hearing-aid button behind her left ear. When I tapped my glass with my fish knife, the young schoolteacher hissed, “Some nerve!” But Ms. Schönherr, from the center of the horseshoe-shaped table, nodded a friendly permission.
I first thanked the assembled ladies for the honor of letting me attend. I praised the culinary art of restaurant owner and Associate Judge Therese Osslieb. A little joke about Helga Paasch’s expense-saving connections with the wholesale market. Then I came to the point.
In owning that the Flounder’s admission of guilt and antiwar speech had moved me deeply, I gained my first opportunity to introduce myself in my changing time-phases. “As early as the Neolithic …” I said. “When we were finally converted to Christianity …” “There can be no doubt, to cite Friedell, that some good came of the plague… .” I quoted myself as Opitz from his “Poem of Consolation Amidst the Horrors of War.” I was at Kolin, Leuthen, Hochkirch. I opened the door when Comrade Bebel came to see me and my good Lena on Brabank. To spare Sieglinde Huntscha, I made only the barest allusion to the Father’s Day death of poor Billy. Then I went into current politics: “Even now it’s as if the canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdafisk had been turned to stone. They shot Jan in the belly. Yes, the police fired on the workers. And that in a Communist state. Yes, wherever men have their fingers on triggers. And that’s how it has always been. The language of arms. Mechanized warfare. Attack to defend. Scorched earth. The Flounder did that. His advice was: Kill! His word signaled violence. He was the source of evil. We are gathered here to punish him. Here, Flounder! Here! Look and see what’s left of you. You dealer of death, you enemy of life!”
I lifted up a bare backbone with the ravaged head attached and showed it to the Flounder in his glass tank. Whereupon Griselde Dubertin and Ruth Simoneit, Huntscha and Paasch, but also Elisabeth Güllen and Beate Hagedorn, who had hitherto been silent, obstinately silent, each grabbed a backbone, and other women grabbed the remaining bones, heads, tail fins, and showed them to the Flounder, so that he was forced to see. And several women cried, “You’re mortal!” Others went further. “The fact is, you’re dead!”
I was overcome with rage. I went to him and threw a backbone down on the platform in front of his tank. “There!” Without delay the women threw down the remaining bones, heads, and fins, until all eleven carcasses lay in a heap and the Flounder was forced to see what was left of his fellows. “There! There!” And we all wiped our fingers and tossed our paper napkins onto the pile. And we all spat on the bony garbage, in which crooked mouths gaped in sightless heads.
But the pallid Flounder, who seemed to have been blown from glass, remained in his hovering position and did not take refuge in his sand bed. Ah, how grievously he suffered. Ah, how right it served him.
Then Ms. Schönherr said: “Punishment has now been dealt. The day after tomorrow the Flounder will be set free to expiate his guilt. All arrangements have been made for transportation. The Womenal is therefore disbanded. Sisters, I thank you.”
With that the dinner party broke up.
On Møn
When the sentence had been announced, it was arranged that Associate Judge Ulla Witzlaff should take charge of its implementation. Even before completing his long peroration on the warlike character of men and on women’s capacity for suffering, the Flounder, because someone, Ruth Simonei
t, I think, was talking some sort of rubbish about the end of the world, had illustrated with examples how prone to catastrophe the earth was and dated the next ice age as “any day now.” But while still engaged in spiriting ten thousand years away in a twinkling, he could be heard, in an aside, expressing the wish that he, the evildoer, conscious of his guilt and bowing to his sentence, might, to enable him to expiate most usefully, be set free in his favorite body of water, namely, the western Baltic. There, he informed the court, he knew an island the east coast of which consisted of steep chalk cliffs, from the top of which on a clear day one could with the naked eye see the similarly shaped island where the tale of “The Fisherman and His Wife” was put into circulation. “Two picturesque spots that are connected geologically and in other ways as well,” said the Flounder, and explained that immediately after the last glacial age—“which really wasn’t so long agol”—the floor of the Baltic had formed between these islands. Flint could be found at the foot of the cliffs and interesting petrifactions as well, such as sea urchins and the tentacles of octopuses: “For the space of a cosmic half hour, the young Baltic was characterized by a Mediterranean warmth.” That was where he wished to be set free. With that as a base he would get on with his new duties—for the advancement of the female cause.
“He means the island of Møn,” said Ulla Witzlaff to her fellow associate judge Helga Paasch, who was sitting beside her. Ulla had spent her childhood on Rügen and attended the School of Church Music in Greifswald before crossing over to the West when the Wall was built in Berlin. Thus she was eminently suited to carry out the Womenal’s sentence and set the Flounder free in the place he had chosen, particularly since Ulla was able to assure the court that the mercury content of the Baltic Sea was minimal at that spot.
Because the authorities of the German Democratic Republic refused permission to cross its territory by train or Volkswagen bus to Rostock-Warnemünde, whence a ferry ran to Gedser in Denmark (the officials never mentioned the Flounder by name, but merely designated him as a “subversive element” or “reactionary individual,” for the republic of workers and peasants lived in fear of the flatfish), it was necessary to fly the condemned Flounder to Hamburg in the strictest secrecy and under close guard, to forestall terrorist acts by Griselde Dubertin’s radical group.
From there he was taken to Travemünde by car. From there the party crossed over to Gedser by the regularly scheduled ferry. There Danish feminists took charge, and the party traveled via Vordingborg to Kalvehave and thence across the bridge to the island of Møn. As it was late afternoon when they arrived, the party stopped for the night at an inn not far from the chalk cliffs.
The Flounder in his special traveling tank had come through the journey in good shape. As though in anticipation of the joyous event, he had lost some of his transparency. His pebbly skin had got back some of its color. Yet despite his cheerful fin play, he remained mute.
And I was there. (Naturally Ilsebill was furious at my wanting to prolong my absence so soon before her confinement. “You don’t give a hoot about the child!” she screamed when I asked for permission over the phone.)
After Ulla Witzlaff, Therese Osslieb, and Helga Paasch had approved my request to travel with them, I was accepted as a helper. In addition to the women already mentioned, our party included Erika Nöttke (the gray mouse) and Ms. von Carnow, the Flounder’s court-appointed counsel (all in sky-blue silk). Allegedly Sieglinde hadn’t wanted to come. Ms. Schönherr thought her presence at the execution of sentence not absolutely called for.
We had good reason to ask the Danish delegation to take security measures that night and the next day, for Ruth Simoneit had joined Griselde Dubertin’s radical opposition group, and both, of them had spoken up (before the verdict) in favor of the death penalty, so that obstructive action if not actual violence was to be feared during the release of the Flounder. The seventh and eighth associate judges of the Womenal, the full-blown housewife Elisabeth Güllen and the biochemist Beate Hagedorn, who reminded me remotely of my Sibylle and Maria Kuczorra, were thought to be radical and suspected of terrorism, especially since they had been absent from the proceedings during the final pleas; only at the great flounder dinner had they been silently present.
The next morning the Flounder had to be carried on foot through a beech forest to the coast. The task fell to me. The tank hung from my neck by two straps like a peddler’s tray. Looking through the glass wall of the tank, I could see the Flounder trying with deft fin play to compensate for my uneven gait. First we took a dirt road, then a narrow path through the woods. Ahead of me (and the Flounder) went the Danish delegation and the few newspaperwomen who had been authorized to accompany us. Behind us, Witzlaff and Osslieb, Helga Paasch and Erika Nöttke. Ms. von Carnow had pronounced the walk too much for her and stayed behind at the hotel.
Of course I attempted a last conversation with the Flounder. As soon as the women ahead of us and behind us were far enough away, I whispered, “For God’s sake, Flounder, say something. Anything, just a word. Is it really all over between us? Have you really written me off? Aren’t you going to advise anyone but those stupid women? Flounder, what’s to become of me? Flounder, say something! I’m completely at a loss!”
But the Flounder’s silence remained unbroken. I carried him as if, along with my burden, I were carrying myself and my historic mission, the male cause, to the grave. Before and behind me the women were chatting merrily. How airily their dresses with their large-flower prints took in the breeze. A Dutch television team shot us for the news. Erika Nöttke gathered a bunch of flowers. There was flint all about, and Paasch picked up a few handy-sized pieces to keep as souvenirs. Ulla Witzlaff, with her clarion voice, sang a Christian hymn, “This day so full of joy …” And in a spirit of sisterhood, Osslieb joined in.
When we came to the unprotected edge of the cliff and were able, since the weather (as promised) was fine, to make out the chalk cliffs of the isle of Rügen, the temptation rose up in me to unbuckle the Flounder in his glass tank (my peddler’s tray) and hurl him down onto the flinty beach (three hundred and fifty feet below), or, rather, I was tempted to leap to my death from the cliff—after all, I’m done for!—with the Flounder still buckled to me, if possible crying aloud, “Long live the male cause!”—or perhaps just to fling myself alone, sparing the Flounder and the future, or pulling perhaps not Osslieb but then Ulla with me—lovingly united in death.
But already Erika Nöttke was anxiously at my side. “I’m worried,” she said. “Don’t you think the sudden change may be too much for the Flounder? For nine months his water has been changed frequently, he has been adequately provided with oxygen and fed regularly, in other words, safeguarded against environmental hazards. Don’t you think the Baltic, with its pollution and supersaturation with algae, might be dangerous for him? In the last few weeks, it’s true, we’ve tried to prepare him by gradually increasing the chemical adulteration, but it will be a shock all the same, possibly too great a one. Think how he has changed in captivity. Look how pale he is, how transparent, almost glassy. Oh, I do hope the Flounder outlives us.”
Helga Paasch was worried, too. But Osslieb reassured Erika Nöttke, saying the change wouldn’t hurt the Flounder, he was a tough customer, sure to live through the next ice age. A few blobs of tar and a bit of mercury wouldn’t mean a thing to him, he’d adapt: if only for the principle of the thing, he’d go on living. “Just look at him!” cried Ulla. “He’s getting his color back. He’ll soon be in the pink!”
After we had all enjoyed the splendid view for a while and posed for the television crew—fillers were needed—we started down through a wooden gully embedded in the chalk cliffs. For tourist use, yard-long logs provided natural steps. By holding my peddler’s tray in both hands, I tried to spare the Flounder excessive jolting in my passage from step to step, but it was pretty bumpy even so. Seeing me bathed in sweat, Erika Nöttke wanted to relieve me. Manfully I declined. (Damned if I let them take my Flounder
away from me. He used to be my Flounder. I’ll stick it out to the bitter end. I’ll keep faith with my history.)
When we got to the bottom, there wasn’t much time for a breather. A glance up the face of the cliffs revealed the grim reality, the danger we were in. Up top stood the bitches of the radical opposition—the Revolutionary Advisory Council—clustered around Griselde Dubertin and Ruth Simoneit. I recognized Elisabeth Güllen and Beate Hagedorn. “Christ!” cried Paasch. “Huntscha is with them!”
When the first stones were thrown down, I thought I recognized the court-appointed defense counsel among the infuriated women.
“Good God!” I cried. “Look who’s gone over to the enemy!”
“Where is she?” Osslieb asked. “Where?”
“There!” I cried. “There!”
But Bettina von Carnow didn’t show herself again. Besides, the hail of stones kept us from getting a good look at the traitor or snapping her picture. It was easy later on to make out Huntscha, Hagedorn, housewife Güllen, and Griselde Dubertin in the newspaperwomen’s numerous photos and in the pan shot taken by the Dutch television team, but not Ms. Carnow. I saw her though, the stupid bitch.
Most of the stones missed us. Poor Erika Nöttke was hit on the head and bled profusely. There was flint all over the isle of Møn, and that’s what they were throwing. Two members of the Danish delegation, an English newspaperwoman, and the Dutch camerawoman were slightly bruised. A piece of flint struck the Flounder’s tank, but no damage was done. In trying to dodge a fist-sized stone (flung perhaps by Griselde Dubertin), I fell on the stony beach and cut my left knee through my trousers. Thank the Lord, I had put the Flounder and his tank down a moment before. Lying thus prone and slightly befuddled with pain, I found a tiny petrified sea urchin, so corroborating the Flounder’s contention that the Baltic had been an almost tropical sea right after the last ice age. (I kept my find. I expect it to bring me luck and protect me from my Ilsebill. Who knows what the future may bring?)